Language Shapes Thoughts—and Storm Preparations

April 22, 2015 7:36 PM

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Why gendered names of hurricanes may be a bad idea

To state the obvious: What we think influences what we say. Less obvious is the converse: namely, the possibility that the language we speak or our chosen words shape, facilitate or constrain thinking. This question might seem abstract, but it seems to affect—among other things—the public response t...

"the possibility that the language we speak or our chosen words shape, facilitate or constrain thinking. "Learned about this idea in one of the more stimulating marketing classes I had called "Culture & Consumption". An example is how the Eskimo language has so many different words for "snow" since it plays such a bigger role in their lives...

I also live in New Orleans... Both Betsy and Katrina were real b**ches! I don't mean to be chauvinistic, but "female" hurricanes scare me a lot more than "male" hurricanes - probably because us guys are just full of hot air....

I remember - vaguely - back in 1947 when I was 4-5 years old living in New Orleans when a hurricane landed and shook my house. Hurricanes had no names back then, and the hurricane is still referred to as the Hurricane of 1947.

Be wary of perceived correlation. I am sure that the hurricane after Katrina and Sandy was widely feared because of the devastation caused by them.As an aside, our ability to understand is limited by our ability to describe.

English, being a language made out of many others is the most flexible of all. A noun can be a verb, an adverb, an adjective, etc. This makes adding new words for ever more exquisite descriptions of objects, feelings and action the most dynamic of all. Therefore, I would imagine that by eliminating gender rending articles to nouns, English gives a boost to interpretation and the assignment of precision to everything we say or think. We have the Greeks, the Romans, the Vikings, the Angles & Saxons and the Celts to thank for the gifts English bestows.

We give hurricanes the names of people mainly because the idea that such awful power and destruction can have no conscious mind behind it is even more terrifying. Even if we all recognize this fiction as nothing more than a way to take a sharp edge off of a very unpleasant reality, it is still somehow comforting.

OK, if gender names for hurricanes skew peoples' thinking/preparedness, then I suggest using names for body parts. Then we can see if anatomical imperatives catch people's attention. I leave it for others to figure out some names. Methinks wind speeds will quickly become irrelevant.

Languages and cultures that don't assign names to categories that others do (such as making no distinction between green and blue) do so because in the environment in which they arose and exist there is no reason to delimit a category and give it a name. Bluish green or greenish blue is enough sometimes. It has nothing at all to do with whether the mind sees the colors we call blue and green.It is not language determining how we think when female-named hurricanes prove more deadly than male. It is our relentlessly categorizing and anthropomorphizing minds that are to blame. It hears a female name and thinks the hurricane will be gentler, because that's an attribute it ordinarily assigns to its category of feminine things.

Of course words shape thought, but that doesn't mean that words create reality; they enable or constrain its perception. For example, recent articles in the Journal have discussed problems of linguistic deformation such as overuse of "like" and loosened grammatical rules. The weakened norms diminish clarity and thus reduce thought.

This is like people who watch cartoons, and hold a pencil in their mouth. If they hold it sideways in their mouth they find the cartoon funnier than if they hold it longways (i.e funnier if their mouth muscles are forced into a smile face vs an O face. Our brains have all sorts of inputs that we don't necessarily have automatic cognitive control over. Language is just one of many.

Tally fatalities or damage or other associated results for a category of events that bear either female or male names.On category or the other will be associated with more fatalities or damage or other associated results.Create a theory to explain why this is so.Written and formatted properly, with proper footnotes, this should qualify as a PhD thesis in history or any other "social science" or artsy craftsy discipline.